One 77-year-old’s search for the truth: 9/11, election fraud, illegal wars, Wall Street criminality, a stolen nuke, the neocon wars, control of the U.S. government by global corporations, the unjustified assault on Social Security, media complicity, and the "Great Recession" about to become the second Great Depression. "The most important truths are hidden from us by the powerful few who strive to steal the American dream by keeping We the People in the dark."

The Real Numbers: Half of America in Poverty -- and It's Creeping UpwardThe Census Bureau has reported that one out of six Americans lives in poverty. A shocking figure. But it's actually much, much worse.

May 26, 2013 | Census Bureau has
reported that 15% of Americans live in poverty. A shocking figure. But
it's actually much worse. Inequality is spreading like a shadowy disease
through our country, infecting more and more households, and leaving a
shrinking number of financially secure families to maintain the charade
of prosperity.1. Almost half of Americans had NO assets in 2009 Analysis of Economic Policy Institute data shows that Mitt Romney's famous 47 percent, the alleged 'takers,' have taken nothing. Their debt exceeded their assets in 2009. 2. It's Even Worse 3 Years Later Since the recession, the disparities have continued to grow. An OECD report states
that "inequality has increased by more over the past three years to the
end of 2010 than in the previous twelve," with the U.S. experiencing
one of the widest gaps among OECD countries. The 30-year decline in wages has worsened since the recession, as low-wage jobs have replaced formerly secure middle-income positions. 3. Based on wage figures, half of Americans are in or near poverty. The IRS reports
that the highest wage in the bottom half of earners is about $34,000.
To be eligible for food assistance, a family can earn up to 130% of the federal poverty line, or about $30,000 for a family of four. Even the Census Bureau recognizes that its own figures under-represent the number of people in poverty. Its Supplemental Poverty Measure increases, by 50%, the number of Americans who earn between one-half and two times the poverty threshold. 4. Based on household expense totals, poverty is creeping into the top half of America. A family in the top half, making $60,000 per year, will have their
income reduced by a total tax bill of about $15,000 ($3,000 for federal income tax and $12,000 for payroll, state, and local taxes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau agree
that food, housing, and transportation expenses will deduct another
$30,000, and that total household expenditures will be about $50,000. That leaves nothing. Nothing, that is, except debt. The median debt level rose to $75,600 in 2009, while the median family net worth, according to the Federal Reserve, dropped from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010. 5. Putting it in Perspective Inequality is at its ugliest for the hungriest people. While food support was being targeted for cuts, just 20 rich Americans made as much from their 2012 investments as the entire 2012 SNAP (food assistance) budget, which serves 47 million people. And as Congress continues to cut life-sustaining programs, its members should note that their 400 friends on the Forbes list made more from their stock market gains last year than the total amount of the food, housing, and education budgets combined.Arguments about poverty won't end. Neither should our efforts to uncover the awful truth. Note: This is an updated, corrected version of the original article, approved by the author.

By Michael
Snyder (The Economic Collapse Blog | Original
Link) May
28, 2013

If you know someone that actually believes that the U.S.
economy is in good shape, just show them the statistics in this article. When
you step back and look at the long-term trends, it is undeniable what is
happening to us. We are in the midst of a horrifying economic decline that is
the result of decades of very bad decisions. 30 years ago, the U.S. national
debt was about one trillion dollars. Today, it is almost 17 trillion dollars.
40 years ago, the total amount of debt in the United States was about 2
trillion dollars. Today, it is more than 56 trillion dollars. At the same time
that we have been running up all of this debt, our economic infrastructure and
our ability to produce wealth has been absolutely gutted. Since 2001, the
United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities and millions
of good jobs have been shipped overseas. Our share of global GDP declined from
31.8 percent in 2001 to 21.6 percent in 2011. The percentage of Americans that
are self-employed is at a record low, and the percentage of Americans that are
dependent on the government is at a record high. The U.S. economy is a complete
and total mess, and it is time that we faced the truth.
The following are 40 statistics about the fall of the U.S. economy that are
almost too crazy to believe…#1
Back in 1980, the U.S. national debt was less than one trillion
dollars. Today, it is rapidly approaching 17 trillion dollars…

#2
During Obama’s first term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it
did under the first 42 U.S
presidents combined.#3 The
U.S. national debt is now more than 23 times larger
than it was when Jimmy Carter became president.#4 If
you started paying off just
the new debt that the U.S. has accumulated during the Obama
administration at the rate of one dollar per second, it would take more than 184,000 years
to pay it off.#5 The
federal government is stealing more than 100 million dollars from our children
and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day.#6
Back in 1970, the total amount of debt in the United States (government debt +
business debt + consumer debt, etc.) was less than 2 trillion dollars. Today it
is over 56 trillion dollars…

#7
According to the World Bank, U.S. GDP accounted for 31.8 percentof all global economic
activity in 2001. That number dropped to 21.6 percent in 2011.#8 The
United States has fallen in the global economic competitiveness rankings
compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.#9
According to The Economist, the United States was the best place in the world
to be born into back in 1988. Today, the United States
is only tied for 16th place.#10
Incredibly, more than 56,000 manufacturing
facilities in the United States have been permanently shut down since 2001.#11
There are less Americans working in manufacturing today than there was in 1950 even though the
population of the country has more than doubled since then.#12
According to the New York Times, there are now approximately
70,000 abandoned buildings in Detroit.#13
When NAFTA was pushed through Congress in 1993, the United States had a trade surplus with Mexico
of 1.6 billion dollars. By 2010, we had a trade deficit with Mexico of 61.6 billion dollars.#14
Back in 1985, our trade deficit with China was approximately 6 million
dollars (million with a little “m”) for the entire year. In 2012, our trade deficit
with China was 315 billion dollars. That was the
largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the
history of the world.#15
Overall, the United States has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the
rest of the world since 1975.#16
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the United States is losing half a million jobs to China
every single year.#17
Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all
men in the United States had jobs. Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United
States have jobs.#18 At
this point, an astounding 53 percent of all American workers make less than
$30,000 a year.#19
Small business is rapidly dying in America. At this point, only about 7 percent of all non-farm workers
in the United States are self-employed. That is an all-time record low.#20
Back in 1983, the bottom 95 percent of all income earners in the United States
had 62 cents of debt for every dollar that they earned. By 2007, that figure
had soared to $1.48.#21 In
the United States today, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans have a
greater net worth than the bottom 90
percent combined.#22
According to Forbes, the 400 wealthiest Americans have more wealth than the
bottom 150 million Americans combined.

#23
The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have as much wealth as the bottom
one-third of all Americans combined.#24
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million
Americans are either “poor” or “low income”.#25
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49 percent of all Americans live in a
home that receives direct monetary benefits from the federal government. Back
in 1983, less than a third of all
Americans lived in a home that received direct monetary benefits from the
federal government.#26
Overall, the federal government runs nearly 80 different “means-tested welfare
programs”, and at this point more than 100 million
Americans are enrolled in at least one of them.#27
Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, one out of every 6 Americans is
on Medicaid, and things are about to get a whole lot worse. It is being
projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans
to the Medicaid rolls.#28 As
I wrote recently, it is being projected that
the number of Americans on Medicare will grow from 50.7 million in 2012 to 73.2 million in 2025.#29 At
this point, Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion
dollars over the next 75 years. That comes to approximately$328,404 for every single household in the
United States.#30
Right now, there are approximately 56 million Americans collecting Social
Security benefits. By 2035, that number is projected to soar to an astounding 91 million.#31
Overall, the Social Security system is facing a 134 trillion dollar
shortfall over the next 75 years.#32
Today, the number of Americans on Social Security Disability now exceeds the entire population
of Greece, and the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the entire population of
Spain.#33
According to a report recently issued by the Pew Research Center,
on average Americans over the age of 65 have 47 times as much wealth as
Americans under the age of 35.#34
U.S. families that have a head of household that is under the age of 30 have a
poverty rate of 37 percent.#35 As
I mentioned recently, the homeownership rate in America is now at its
lowest level in nearly 18 years.#36
There are now 20.2 million Americans that
spend more than half of their incomes on housing. That represents a 46 percent
increase from 2001.#3745 percent of all children are living in poverty in
Miami, more than 50 percent of all
children are living in poverty in Cleveland, and about 60 percent of all children are living in
poverty in Detroit.#38
Today, more than a million public school students in
the United States are homeless. This is the first time that has ever happened
in our history.#39
When Barack Obama first entered the White House, about 32 million Americans
were on food stamps. Now, more than 47 million
Americans are on food stamps.#40
According to one calculation, the number
of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska,
Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa,
Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New
Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah,
Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”

William K. Black, author of THE BEST WAY TO ROB A BANK IS TO OWN ONE, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. Black developed the concept of "control fraud" frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a "weapon." Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae's former senior management.

Quantitative Easing is the term given to the Federal Reserve’s policy
of printing 1,000 billion new dollars annually in order to finance the
US budget deficit by purchasing US Treasury bonds and to keep the prices
high of debt-related derivatives on the “banks too big to fail” (BTBF)
balance sheets by purchasing mortgage-backed derivatives. Without QE,
interest rates would be much higher, and values on the banks’ balance
sheets would be much lower.

Quantitative Easing has been underway since December 2008. During
these 54 months, the Federal Reserve has created several trillion new
dollars with which the Fed has monetized the same amount of debt.

One result of this policy is that most real US interest rates are
negative. Another result is that the supply of dollars has outstripped
the world’s demand for dollars.

These two results are the reason that the Federal Reserve’s policy of
printing money with which to purchase Treasury bonds and mortgage
backed derivatives threatens the dollar’s exchange value and, thus, the
dollar’s role as world reserve currency.

To be the world reserve currency means that the dollar can be used to
pay any and every country’s oil bills and trade deficit. The dollar is
the medium of international payment.

This is very helpful to the US and is the main source of US power.
Because the dollar is the reserve currency, the US can cover its import
costs and pay for its cost of operation simply by creating its own paper
money.

If the dollar were not the reserve currency, Washington would not be
able to finance its wars or continue to run large trade and budget
deficits. Therefore, protecting the exchange value of the dollar is
Washington’s prime concern if it is to remain a superpower.

The threats to the dollar are alternative monies–currencies that are
not being created in enormous quantities, gold and silver, and Bitcoins,
a digital currency.

The Bitcoin threat was eliminated on May 17 when the Gestapo
Department of Homeland Security seized Bitcoin’s accounts. The excuse
was that Bitcoin had failed to register in keeping with the US
Treasury’s anti-money laundering requirements.

Washington has stifled the threat from other currencies by convincing
other large currencies to out-print the dollar. Japan has complied,
and the European Central Bank, though somewhat constrained by Germany,
has entered the printing mode in order to bail out the private banks
endangered by the “sovereign debt crisis.”

That leaves gold and silver. The enormous increase in the prices of
gold and silver over the last decade convinced Washington that there are
a number of miscreants who do not trust the dollar and whose numbers
must not be permitted to increase.

The price of gold rose from $272 an ounce in December 2000 to
$1,917.50 on August 23, 2011. The financial gangsters who own and run
America panicked. With the price of the dollar collapsing in relation to
historical real money, how could the dollar’s exchange rate to other
currencies be valid? If the dollar’s exchange value came under attack,
the Federal Reserve would have to stop printing and would lose control
over interest rates.

The bond and stock market bubbles would pop, and the interest
payments on the federal debt would explode, leaving Washington even more
indebted and unable to finance its wars, police state, and bankster
bailouts.

Something had to be done about the rising price of gold and silver.

There are two bullion markets. One is a paper market in New York,
Comex, where paper claims to gold are traded. The other is the physical
market where personal possession is taken of the metal–coin shops,
bullion dealers, jewelry stores.

The way the banksters have it set up, the price of bullion is not set
in the markets in which people actually take possession of the metals.
The price is set in the paper market where speculators gamble.

This bifurcated market gave the Federal Reserve the ability to protect the dollar from its printing press.

On Friday, April 12, 2013, short sales of gold hit the New York
market in an amount estimated to have been somewhere between 124 and 400
tons of gold. This enormous and unprecedented sale implies an illegal
conspiracy of sellers intent on rigging the market or action by the
Federal Reserve through its agents, the BTBF that are the bullion banks.

The enormous sales of naked shorts drove down the gold price,
triggering stop-loss orders and margin calls. The attack continued on
Monday, April 15, and has continued since.

Before going further, note that there are position limits imposed on
the number of contracts that traders can sell at one time. The 124 tons
figure would have required 14 traders with no open interest on the
exchange to sell all together in the same few minutes 40,000 futures
contracts. The likelihood of so many traders deciding to short at the
same moment at the maximum permitted is not believable. This was an
attack ordered by the Federal Reserve, which is why there is no
investigation of the illegality.

Note also that no seller that wanted out of a position would give
himself a low price by dumping an enormous amount all at once unless the
goal was not profit but to smash the bullion price.

Since the April 12-15 attack on the gold price, subsequent attacks
have occurred at 2pm Hong Kong time and 2 am New York time. At this time
activity is light, waiting on London to begin operating. As William
S.Kaye has observed, no entity concerned about profits would choose this
time to sell 20,000 to 30,000 futures contracts, but this is what has
been happening.

Who can be unconcerned with losing money in this way? Only a central bank that can print it.

Now we come to the physical market where people take possession of
bullion instead of betting on paper instruments. Look at this chart from
ZeroHedge. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-16/gold-demand-one-chart-physical-vs-etf
The demand for physical possession is high, despite the assault on
gold that began in 2011, but as the price is set in the non-real paper
market, orchestrated short sales, as in the current quarter of 2013, can
drive down the price regardless of the fact that the actual demand for
gold and silver cannot be met.

While the corrupt Western financial press urges people to abandon
bullion, everyone is trying to purchase more, and the premiums above the
spot price have risen. Around the world there is a shortage of gold and
silver in the forms, such as one-ounce coins and ten-ounce bars, that
individuals demand.

That the decline in gold and silver prices is an orchestration is
apparent from the fact that the demand for bullion in the physical
market has increased while naked short sales in the paper market imply a
flight from bullion.

What does this illegal manipulation of markets by the Federal Reserve
tell us? It tells us that the Federal Reserve sees no way out of
printing money in order to support the federal deficit and the insolvent
banks. If the dollar came under attack and the Federal Reserve had to
stop printing dollars, interest rates would rise. The bond and stock
markets would collapse. The dollar would be abandoned as reserve
currency. Washington would no longer be able to pay its bills and would
lose its hegemony. The world of hubristic Washington would collapse.

It remains to be seen whether Washington can prevail over the world
demand for gold and silver. Can the dollar remain supreme when
offshoring has deprived the US of the ability to cover its imports with
exports? Can the dollar remain supreme when the Federal reserve is
creating 1,000 billion new ones each year, while the BRICS, China and
Japan, China and Australia, and China and Russia are making deals to
settle their trade balances without the use of the dollar?

If the consumption-based US economy deprived of consumer income by
jobs offshoring takes a further dip down in the third or fourth
quarter–a downturn that cannot be masked by phony statistical
releases–the federal deficit will rise. What will be the effect on the
dollar if the Federal Reserve has to increase its Quantitative Easing?

A perfect storm has been prepared for America. Real interest rates
are negative, but debt and money are being created hand over foot. The
dollar’s demise awaits the world’s decision how to get out of it. The
Federal Reserve can print dollars with which to keep the bond and stock
markets high, but the Federal Reserve cannot print foreign currencies
with which to keep the dollar afloat.

When the dollar goes, Washington’s power goes, which is why the
bullion market is rigged. Protect the power. That is the agenda. Is it
another Washington over-reach?

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Welcome to the Brave New World of Corporatized Medicine: Just Hope You Don't Get Sick!"Business freedom" in America increasingly means the God-given right to exploit the vulnerability of the public.

May 13, 2013| One of the most effective scare techniques employed to preserve our
grotesquely inefficient, overpriced health care system has been to
invoke the red peril of “socialized medicine”. Never mind that
foreigners in advanced economies fail to recognize the caricatures
scaremongers supply, or that Americans who need emergency care while
overseas are almost without exception impressed with the caliber of care
and astonished by the low (sometimes no) cost to them. After all,
Americans live in the best of all possible worlds, and consumer and
business freedom are always better.

In fact, business freedom here increasingly means the God-given right
to exploit the vulnerability of the public. The example slouching into
view is more corporate control over the practice of medicine. And based
on the previews, it will make the horrors falsely attributed to
socialized medicine look pale.

Two accounts last week bring the issue home. The first came in the Health Care Renewal blog
(hat tip Lysa). It’s a reminder of how the current institutional
efforts to regiment doctors undermine the caliber of medical care. It
has become distressingly common for HMOs and other medical enterprises
to have business-school trained managers putting factory-style
production parameters on doctor visits. Outside of foreclosure mills,
it’s hard to find similar approaches in other professions.

The post describes how a pediatrician, Pauline, who has developed a
reputation for treating chronic conditions is at loggerheads with her
for-profit practice. The suits don’t like her patient mix. She gets too
many tough cases, when they’d rather have basically healthy kids who are
there for a cold or ear infection. Mind you, this is only partly a
money issue. These visits can be “up coded” so as to get larger
insurance/patient payments, but she gets a higher level of patients in
less-generous state insurance programs. But some of the pushback is that
her practice is perceived as disruptive, since she uses what is
perceived as too much of her and staff time, separate and apart from the
economics. She’s constantly breaking management’s precious guidelines.
One of her turf struggles:

She had set up a visit to see a new medically complex
patient and had blocked off 40 minutes, the amount of time she felt she
needed to do a good job. The child had a complex genetic disorder,
cerebral palsy, and heart, lung, and kidney problems. Both the
cardiologist and the nephrologist had called asking her to take this
patient. She agreed. After she had scheduled the visit, a manager called
her and told her that she was being allowed only 15 minutes to see that
patient. After some fruitless discussion with him, Pauline finally
said, “Okay, I guess that means that you’ll be seeing the patient
instead of me, right?” The shocked voice at the other end of the phone
line replied, “What do you mean? I don’t know how to take care of
patients.” “That’s exactly my point,” Pauline put in.

Pauline explained that this manager assigned to her office is not
even a college graduate. Physicians cannot access the schedule
electronically and have no control over scheduling. These functions are
controlled by the office manager and (amazingly) by some of the medical
assistants who have received some “leadership” training. These medical
assistants are even allowed to evaluate the clinical competency and
skills of the physicians.

And to add insult to injury, how long did this discussion take? All
those minutes the doctor spent fighting with a petty bureaucrat come at
the expense of patient care.

As an aside, it’s hard to stress enough that this sort of
demoralizing micromanagement and unwillingness to listen to and learn
from workers, is a widespread shortcoming of management American-style.
And it has weirdly been airbrushed out of the media. When I was a kid in
business school, US manufacturers were having their clocks cleaned by
Germans and the Japanese. There was a good deal of critical self
examination back then. One source of foreign ascendancy was that they
had newer factories, so you couldn’t really blame American management
for that one. But the second was that it was widely acknowledged that US
managers were generally poor at dealing with labor. And this wasn’t
“labor” in the union sense, but at having productive relationships with
factory workers (note that there has been massive revisionist history
since then. When I was in Bschool, none of my classmates, nearly half of
whom had worked in major manufacturing companies, had bad things to say
about unions.) Now you’ll often see the decline of American
manufacturing attributed to unions in an “everybody knows that” tone.

So let me add a further nugget about Pauline’s
background. In one of her previous jobs, she was made the manager of a
pediatric outpatient center within a county hospital caring for a
largely indigent population. This center had been running in the red for
a good while. Pauline took over and within 28 months she’d streamlined
the place and had them running well in the black, while still
administering a quality of care that Pauline and her colleagues could be
proud of. In short, Pauline could probably tell the managers of her
current practice a thing or two about how to optimize patient scheduling
without compromising care or cost —if they’d listen.

As bad as that is, most patients are unware of how much their care
has been fitted to a Procrustean bed. The deliberate degradation in the
name of profits is going to become more obvious, at least if the health
care industry has its way.

I strongly encourage you to read this post
from Whole Health Chicago (hat tip Lambert) in full. It shows how the
future of American medicine is to fire the ones who are unhealthy. No, I
am not making that up. The writer, Dr. David Edelberg, describes a
recent presentation by a large insurance company. They’ve apparently
been hosting similar sessions with physicians in the Chicago area in
large medical practices. Here are the key bits (emphasis original):

The speaker at these evenings is always a physician
employed by the insurance company. His/her title is medical director (I
begin to think there must be dozens and dozens on their payroll) and he
always begins by reassuring the audience that he was in clinical
practice himself so he understands something of what
physicians–especially primary care physicians–are facing. I view this
physician more as a “Judas steer,” the animal that leads an innocent but
doomed herd of cattle through the slaughterhouse corridors to the
killing floor.

• The health industry hopes that individual medical
practices and small medical groups will ultimately disappear from the
landscape by being financially absorbed into larger groups owned by
hospital systems.

And why do the powers that be regard this as desirable? Although the
article does not stress this point, doctors have an established revenue
stream. So the acquirers buy them out and impose discipline on those
artistic, freewheeling doctors. The “practice style,” which used to mean
the independence that doctors once enjoyed, is now an Orwellianism and
includes hewing to corporate guidelines as to how to operate.

And here’s what to expect:

Physicians are expected to spend a limited amount of time
with each patient, and are encouraged to see as many patients as
possible during a workday. The insurance companies, sometimes with the
token cooperation of a few physician-employees, create vast books of
patient-care guidelines to which they believe their physicians must be
“accountable” (remember this word, it will crop up again). These
guidelines might mean documented Pap smear and mammogram frequency,
weight management and exercise, colonoscopies for patients over 50, and
getting that evil LDL (bad cholesterol) below 99 by any means possible…

If the chart audit system discovers that a physician, for whatever
reason, is an “outlier”–that she’s either not following the guidelines
exactly or not getting the results anticipated for her patient
population—she’ll be financially penalized. A quick example of what
might occur: if your LDL is 115, you may be on the receiving end of a
statin sales pitch from your doctor, not because bringing it down to 99
will improve your longevity, but because your refusal to do so will
impact her financial bottom line.

Now of course, you might say, “Well, in fairness, medicine is too
much of a cottage industry. Look at how many doctors give unnecessary
annual EKGs to patients in low risk groups. How else are we going to get
to evidence-based medicine?” The problem is that what we as patients
will get isn’t driven by best outcomes, it’s driven by profits. Edelberg
explains:

…the subtext of “standardized” always includes the
unspoken “spend less money on the patient.” Thus, a doctor might be
financially penalized for recommending nutritional counseling to lower
cholesterol (“counseling is expensive”) instead of writing a generic
statin drug (cheap). Or recommending psychotherapy (“therapy is very
expensive”) instead of generic Prozac (cheaper than M&M’s). Or
referring patients for massage, acupuncture, or even chiropractic
(“expensive, expensive, expensive!”) instead of pushing an
over-the-counter antiinflammatory (free to the insurance company, as
it’s OTC).

And I shudder to think what becomes of patients who don’t hew to
standard templates: the person who had a high body mass but not due to
dangerous abdominal fat (which is what creates the health risk) who is
pushed to take the latest, greatest diet drug. What about people who
don’t buy into the religion of getting your LDL down to below 100 (one
reader argued that while it may lower your risk of heart disease, it
increases your all-factor death risk by reducing your ability to fight
MRSA)? Will they face penalties if they fail to comply?

No, you just will find it nearly impossible to get a doctor to take you:

• Let me close with a best-as-I-recall quote from an insurance company medical director.
“We can no longer afford to pay for health care under the PPO model.
Our plan is to phase out all fee-for-service care during the next few
years. We’ll pay you doctors a finite amount of money to take care of a
defined population. We tell doctors, ‘Don’t spend much money and you can
keep the difference. Period. Don’t follow guidelines, and you’ll be
leaving behind some serious money on the table and we’ll just take it
back.’”

In case you think I overstated the implications, Edelberg recapped the discussion that ensued:

One physician piped up…. “But what about the
non-compliant patients who won’t take the meds, don’t eat well, don’t
have mammograms, continue to smoke? And what about
super-health-conscious patients who want their vitamin levels measured
and want referrals to acupuncturists?”

In other words, if you are high maintenance because you don’t do what
your doctor says (and remember, “non-compliant” includes people who
don’t follow orders because they think the cookie-cutter approach isn’t
right for them) or want higher service or per the example of the
pediatrician Patricia’s 40 minute case, have a complicated set of
ailments, you’ll be shunted. The brave new world of corporate medicine
will eject you.

The rich are unlikely even to know that this change is occurring.
There will be a tier of doctors on the high end to cater to patients who
want more personalized, cutting edge treatment and might need some
prodding. And they can always go abroad if they can’t find what they
need here. But for ordinary schlubs, expect to find the doctor’s office
become more hostile as the brave new world of corporatized medicine
becomes entrenched.

Yves Smith is the founder of Naked Capitalism and the author of
'ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and
Corrupted Capitalism.'

Will JPMorgan Chase Bankers Finally Pay the Piper?

Will California Attorney General Kamala
Harris hang tough in her new lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, the first
to target individual bankers accused of defrauding the public? If so, it
would be the first time in five years that executives at a major bank
have personally paid a price for their misdeeds.

Weekend at Jamie’s

Recent revelations have shown the world that JPMorgan Chase comes as
close as any institution in America to embodying all that is corrupt,
contemptible, and criminal about today’s megabanks. This is gratifying,
at least on a personal level, since that was not a popular assessment
when we first started writing about JPM and CEO Jamie Dimon a few years
back.In those days Dimon was help up as the “good banker” by the president
and the press. His institution was considered well-managed and ethical
by some of the more shallow members of the popular press, despite the
plethora of scandals and crimes like the Alabama bribery case.Since then we’ve had a variety of Chase revelations: the “Burger King kids”
details behind its massive foreclosure fraud; its confessed criminal
mistreatment of active duty military personnel; its deeds in fraudulently propping up a failed mortgage lender (it was like a financial Weekend at Bernie’s);
and (speaking of “Bernies”) its negligence (at best) in the handling of
the fraudulent Madoff accounts, which should have triggered all sorts
of red-flag warnings.
Now there’s the London Whale scandal and what appears to be a subsequent case of investor deception.The bank wound up paying a staggering $16 billion in fines and settlements over a four-year period, more than 12 percent of its net income during that time.

The Scandal of Our Time

An ethically healthy society would never have lionized a CEO like
Jamie Dimon or an institution like JPMorgan Chase. That’s why we’ve
called it “the scandal of our time.”
What explains Dimon’s inability to stem the lawbreaking and correct his
organization’s broken ethical system? The most generous interpretation
is that he’s an incompetent manager — so incompetent that, even after
numerous suits, revelations, and settlements, “Jamie didn’t know“ about all the illegal and unethical behavior that continued unabated in his institution.

Jamie Dimon

Needless to say, there are more plausible explanations.And yet, in those cases where the bank has been called to account
with fines and settlements, it has been shareholders and not the
wrongdoing bankers themselves,who have paid cost. Ironically, that even
happens when the shareholders themselves are the ones who were
defrauded. That’s why we say that bank fraud is the only crime on Earth
in which the victims make restitution on behalf of the wrongdoers.Is this ugly pattern finally changing?

Meet the Does

Blogger and finance expert Yves Smith thinks so. California Attorney General Kamala Harris is suing JPMorgan Chase and individual bankers (named
as “Does 1 through 100″) for “commit(ting) debt collection abuses”
against Chase credit card holders, “flooding California’s courts with…
collection lawsuits based on patently insufficient evidence.”The Harris suit calls on the Court to assess $2,500 against each
defendant for each violation of “Business and Professions Code section
17200,” and an additional $2,500 penalty for each violation perpetrated
against a senior citizen or disabled person.That may not sound like a lot of money for a banker but, as Smith points out,
there are more than 100,000 potential violations. Smith writes: “If
(Harris) can get the individuals who were supervising the robosigning
operations (better yet, the C level execs ultimately responsible) and
the complicit law firms, she might bankrupt some well-placed people.
This could be extremely entertaining.”Indeed. In fact, I’ll buy the popcorn.

Walking the Walk

From Yves Smith:

“Now Harris has been widely depicted as
an opportunist. But she’s kicking up more dirt on the banking front
right now than any other official … This case has enough headline value
that Harris might go a few rounds before settling. JP Morgan is known
for throwing vast amounts of lawyers at opponents to bury them in legal
costs and busywork, so this case, sadly, is unlikely to go to trial. But
if she can get the goods on the right sort of DOES, she might make some
individuals pay in a serious way, which would have far more deterrent
effect.

Adds Smith: “If nothing else, we should applaud what she’s so far and press her to keep going.”I generally agree with all of the above. But some of us have been
burned by even the most cautious cheerleading for seemingly promising
Wall Street investigations and lawsuits. That’s especially been true
when the actions in question are being conducted by elected officials
with any sort of connection to the Obama White House, an institution
which has become synonymous with efforts to protect bankers and restrict
their punishment to the merely symbolic.Attorney General Harris is considered close to the president. She’s
undoubtedly being either cajoled or pressured (or both) to cave on this
issue.

Reaching Out

So I’m going to emphasize the words “press her” in Smith’s last
sentence. If Harris is determined to see this through, her suit is
potentially the kind of sea change in banker law enforcement we’ve been
waiting for. But that means she’ll need emphatic expressions of support
to strengthen her resolve (and to explain to the Administration why she
can’t and won’t back down).And if this is merely another publicity stunt, she needs to know that
a choreographed cave-in will be very poorly received by her
constituents.

Harris therefore deserves strong
expressions of support, along with statements that citizens expect her
to see this action through — at least far enough to ensure that the
malefactors involved pay some personal penalty for their misdeeds.

(Contact information for Kamala Harris, Attorney General for the State of California, can be found here.)

RJ Eskow

Republished from Huffington Post with the author’s permission.Saturday, 11 May 2013

Over the last several years I have watched the rise of an important
new intellect on the American scene. Ron Unz, publisher of The American
Conservative, has demonstrated time and again the extraordinary ability
to reexamine settled issues and show that the accepted conclusion was
incorrect.

One of his early achievements was to dispose of the myth of immigrant
crime by demonstrating that “Hispanics have approximately the same
crime rates as whites of the same age and gender.” You can imagine the
uproar, but Unz won the debate.

Unz provoked and prevailed in another controversy when he concluded
that Mexican-Americans have approximately the same innate intelligence
as whites, with their lower IQs being due to transitory socio-economic
deprivation.

He next surprised by showing the connection between the declining
real value of the minimum wage (about one-third less than in the 1960s)
and immigration. Americans cannot survive on one-third less minimum
income than four decades ago, and the unfilled jobs are taken by
Hispanics who live many to the room. A higher minimum wage, Unz pointed
out, would cure the illegal immigration problem as American citizens
would fill the jobs.

I wrote about some of Unz’s remarkable findings. One of my favorites
is his comparison of the responsiveness of the Chinese and US
governments to their publics. I found his conclusion convincing that the
authoritarian one-party Chinese government was more responsive to the
Chinese people than democratic two-party Washington is to the American
people.

The person is rare who can take on such controversial issues in such a
professional way that he wins the admiration even of his critics. In
my opinion, Ron Unz is a national resource. He has established online
libraries of important periodicals and magazines from the pre-Internet
era, information that otherwise essentially would be lost. I have not
met him, but he donates to this site and is an independent thinker free
of The Matrix.

“The circumstances surrounding our Iraq War demonstrate this,
certainly ranking it among the strangest military conflicts of modern
times. The 2001 attacks in America were quickly ascribed to the radical
Islamists of al-Qaeda, whose bitterest enemy in the Middle East had
always been Saddam Hussein’s secular Baathist regime in Iraq. Yet
through misleading public statements, false press leaks, and even forged
evidence such as the “yellowcake” documents, the Bush administration
and its neoconservative allies utilized the compliant American media to
persuade our citizens that Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs posed a deadly
national threat and required elimination by war and invasion. Indeed,
for several years national polls showed that a large majority of
conservatives and Republicans actually believed that Saddam was the
mastermind behind 9/11 and the Iraq War was being fought as retribution.
Consider how bizarre the history of the 1940s would seem if America had
attacked China in retaliation for Pearl Harbor.

“True facts were easily available to anyone paying attention in the
years after 2001, but most Americans do not bother and simply draw their
understanding of the world from what they are told by the major media,
which overwhelmingly—almost uniformly—backed the case for war with Iraq;
the talking heads on TV created our reality. Prominent journalists
across the liberal and conservative spectrum eagerly published the most
ridiculous lies and distortions passed on to them by anonymous sources,
and stampeded Congress down the path to war.

“The result was what my late friend Lt. Gen. Bill Odom rightly called
the “greatest strategic disaster in United States history.” American
forces suffered tens of thousands of needless deaths and injuries, while
our country took a huge step toward national bankruptcy [and a police
state]. Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and others have
estimated that with interest the total long-term cost of our two recent
wars may reach as high as $5 or $6 trillion, or as much as $50,000 per
American household, mostly still unpaid. Meanwhile, economist Edward
Wolff has calculated that the Great Recession and its aftermath cut the
personal net worth of the median American household to $57,000 in 2010
from a figure nearly twice as high three years earlier. Comparing these
assets and liabilities, we see that the American middle class now hovers
on the brink of insolvency, with the cost of our foreign wars being a
leading cause.

“But no one involved in the debacle ultimately suffered any serious
consequences, and most of the same prominent politicians and highly paid
media figures who were responsible remain just as prominent and highly
paid today. For most Americans, reality is whatever our media organs
tell us, and since these have largely ignored the facts and adverse
consequences of our wars in recent years, the American people have
similarly forgotten. Recent polls show that only half the public today
believes that the Iraq War was a mistake.”

Unz covers a number of cases of criminality, treason, and coverups at
high levels of government and points out that “these dramatic,
well-documented accounts have been ignored by our national media.” One
reason for “this wall of uninterest” is that both parties are complicit
and thus equally eager to bury the facts.

Unz is raising the question of the efficacy of democracy. Does the
way democracy works in America provide any more self-rule than in
undemocratic regimes? He offers this example:

“Most of the Americans who elected Barack Obama in 2008 intended
their vote as a total repudiation of the policies and personnel of the
preceding George W. Bush administration. Yet once in office, Obama’s
crucial selections—Robert Gates at Defense, Timothy Geither at Treasury,
and Ben Bernake at the Federal Reserve—were all top Bush officials, and
they seamlessly continued the unpopular financial bailouts and foreign
wars begun by his predecessor, producing what amounted to a third Bush
term.”

In an article not long ago, I raised the issue whether Americans live
in The Matrix with their perceptions and thoughts controlled by
disinformation as in George Orwell’s 1984.

Unz adds to this perspective. He tells the story of Russian oligarch
Boris Berezovsky’s plan to transform Russia into a make-believe
two-party state complete with heated battles fought on divisive and
symbolic issues. Behind the scenes the political elites would
orchestrate the political battles between the parties with the purpose
of keeping the population divided and funneling popular dissatisfaction
into meaningless dead-end issues. In such a system, self-serving power
prevails. After describing Berezovsky’s plot, Unz asks if Berezovsky got
his idea from observing the American political scene.

Thinking further about the propagandistic nature of the US media, Unz writes:

“Individuals from less trusting societies are often surprised at the
extent to which so many educated Americans tend to believe whatever the
media tells them and ignore whatever it does not, placing few
constraints on even the most ridiculous propaganda. For example, a
commentator on my article described the East German media propaganda he
had experienced prior to Reunification as being in many respects more
factual and less totally ridiculous than what he now saw on American
cable news shows. One obvious difference was that Western media was so
globally dominant during that era that the inhabitants of the German
Democratic Republic inevitably had reasonable access to a contrasting
second source of information, forcing their media to be much more
cautious in its dishonesty, while today almost any nonsense uniformly
supported by the MSNBC-to-FoxNews spectrum of acceptable opinion remains
almost totally unquestioned by most Americans.” http://www.theamericanconservative.com/american-pravda-reality-television/

Unz’s view of the US media as propagandists for power is consistent
with that of John Pilger, one of the last remaining real journalists who
refuses to serve power, and with Gerald Celente, who sums up the sordid
American media in one word–”presstitutes.” I know from my own media
experience that an independent print and TV media no longer exists in
the West. The American media is a tightly controlled disinformation
ministry.

Those few Americans who are free of the constraints imposed by dogmas
on their ability to think and to process information have a huge
responsibility for their small number. The assault on the rule of law
began in the last years of the Clinton regime, but the real destruction
of the US Constitution, the basis for the United States, was achieved by
the neoconservative George W. Bush and Obama regimes. Wars without
declarations by Congress, torture in violation of both US and
international law, war crimes in violation of the Nuremberg standard,
indefinite detention and assassination of US citizens without due
process of law, universal spying on US citizens without warrants,
federalization of state and local police now armed with military weapons
and uniforms, detention centers, “your papers, please” (without the
Gestapo “please”) not only at airports but also on highways, streets,
bus terminals, train stations, and at sporting events.

On May 5 Obama gave the commencement address at Ohio State
University. No doubt that the graduates thought that they were being
honored by being addressed by the world’s greatest tyrant.

Obama told the graduating class, to applause, that their obligation
as citizens is to trust the government. Outdoing George Orwell’s Big
Brother, Obama said in public to a graduating class of a great
university without shame: “You have grown up hearing voices that
incessantly warn of government as . . . some sinister entity that’s at
the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their
best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking
just around the corner. You should reject these voices.”

Blogger's Note: You should understand the monologue below as PCR's parody of what Obama might have been thinking in that moment, as opposed to the words he was actually using at the Ohio State commencement.

Listen to my propaganda, not to those constitutional experts, legal
authorities, and critics of me, the First Black President, who tell you
to beware of unaccountable government. Due process is decided by the
demands of the war on terror. If there is a war on terror, do you want a
fair trial or do you want to be safe? I am going to make you safe by
not giving defendants accused of terrorism, who some
liberal-pinko-commie judge would set free, a fair trial.

Making you safe by enveloping you in a police state is a nonpartisan
undertaking. Just listen to Lindsay Graham and Peter King and John
McCain. These Republican leaders are demanding the police state that I
am providing.

As my own legal department, The US Department Of Justice, decided,
the Dictator, I mean, elected president, has the power to save the
country from domestic and foreign terrorists by abrogating the US
Constitution, an out-of-date document that binds our hands and prevents
us from keeping you, our serfs and minions, I mean our cherished
citizens, safe.

Trust me. That is your obligation as a US citizen. Trust me and I
will make you free, happy, employed sometime later in this century when
the Amerikan Empire controls the world.

The US Constitution was written by people who opposed Empire. These
people were misguided, just like the Roman Republicans who did not
understand the need for a Caesar. The American Empire, as the
neoconservatives have made clear, is what keeps you free from terrorism.
We have to kill them over there before they come over here. And those
who are over here will be killed too. We tolerate no dissent. That part
of the Constitution is gone, along with the rest of it.

Now give me my honorary doctorate, another sign of approval of my usurpation.

About Me

B.S. in Physics, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1960 Ph.D. in Physics, Brown University, 1966. Fellow, American Physical
Society. Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Fellow, American Ceramic Society. Member, Geological Society of America, Research Physicist at Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Washington, DC,
1967-2001. Fulbright-García Robles Fellow at Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, 1997. Invited Professor of Research at Universités
de Paris-6 & 7, Lyon-1, et St-Etienne (France) and Tokyo Institute
of Technology, 2000-2004. Adjunct Professor of Materials Science and
Engineering, University of Arizona, 2004-2005. Consultancy: impactGlass
research international, 2005-present.
Winner, one national and two international research awards and honored
by Brown University with a "Distinguished Graduate School Alumnus
Award." Author, 198 papers in peer-reviewed journals and books, Principal Author of 114 of these.